Truk Lagoon Diving Shipwrecks of the South Pacific

00:00
Hello, and welcome to Diversync, the Netcast and podcast for scuba divers. My name is Rich Sinewick, and you're listening to episode 524. And I'm recording this on August 7, way later than I want it to, but I have had, like, a really cool summer and really cool. Lots of stuff going on. It's been weird, and I'll talk about that in a later episode, but I'm kind of gonna go month by month now when we go through episodes and kind of take you through what I've been doing all summer, and hopefully you find it as exciting as I did. So let's get started on in May. So the last time we spoke, it was towards the end of April, and I was getting ready to go to truck Lagoon, and it had been a Covid casualty. It had been rescheduled.

00:46
They took the first deposit in 2017, signed everybody up, and it was mostly the same group that had signed up. A lot of them had moved off. A lot of them had moved into different areas. Some people went off the paddy route. Other people went off into cave diving. So it was an interesting group that used to be really tight knit, but it wasn't as tight knit as it had been in the past. So I was a little bit disappointed in that. But other than that, the trip was pretty darn spectacular. So I'm going to take you through it. So getting there really sucked. It was a long process. And what I did, because I stress a lot about making sure things are perfect, and my wife stresses more, is we scheduled our airfare so that we had huge gaps of layover in between.

01:37
And the huge gaps of layover in between is supposed to make us feel a whole lot better about it. And it did. And it allowed us to basically overcome jet lag. What we did was we flew, essentially, we flew from home to. God, I can't remember where it was now, but it was like, I think it was home to Houston, and then we flew almost directly tokyo. I think it was home, actually, I think it was home to Chicago and then directly tokyo. Now, when we got tokyo, that was a really long flight. And Tokyo, most of the people weren't going tokyo, and I couldn't understand why most were going to South Korea. I didn't set up airfare for everybody because there were so many people with points at this point that I didn't want to deal with it.

02:27
But getting there on the Tokyo flight, we got there with about a nine hour layover, giving our bags more than enough time to get there giving everything we got. I got some great japanese food, sushi, sashimi, and that. And then went down in this huge airport to a area that was blank. Now, were going to be about. We had about six to 8 hours to wait. So it was an empty part of the airport, so we just kind of slept well, I wake up to a whole bunch of people setting up cameras and stuff, and it is close to midnight local time. And what it turned out was that united, who we flew on, had never had a Tokyo to Guam flight. They had been trying for one for almost 15 years and had never been allowed.

03:18
And this was going to be the inaugural flight. So here we are in desperate need of a shower, and we ended up being part of a big celebrity celebration. There were a bunch of Tiktokers there, a whole bunch of people. We got our pictures taken. We got these really cool gift bags with little trinkets and tchotchkes and all that kind of stuff. But then that was flying it to Guamdez. Okay, so we flew to Guam, get there real early in the morning, decided to sleep it off. And we had gotten a 27 hours layover in Guam. So I really was excited about that because I was going to get to sleep. But we rented a car because I wanted a tour. Guam. I'd never been there. It was the first of the japanese world War two islands.

03:59
I mean, I'm a huge european theater history buff, but I've never been really much of, up until now, much of a pacific theater world war two buff. But when we got to Guam, we had rented a car, so went and ended up hooking up with one of the other guys that was. Was there, and we all got on the same flight. It was all kind of cool. And then went there, and there was. Guam was spectacular. The first thing we did was find a beach, go and see the beautiful Pacific Ocean. And then there were these trees that were attracting butterflies, and there were. They looked like the leaves were butterflies. That was pretty cool. If you're following me on Facebook and Twitter, maybe on Instagram, I had a bunch of videos and pictures from that at the time. But this beach was beautiful.

04:44
It was really nice. We were desperate. Need of showers at this point. We couldn't get into the hotel, but we could drop off our bags. And so then we got back to the hotel, took a nap, and then we decided to wake up from the nap and then go and do sightseeing. And sightseeing was spectacular. There were world war two japanese embattlements. There were guns, gun mounts, a lot of spanish stuff, too. I didn't realize that Guam had been conquered by the Spaniards long before it was conquered by the Japanese. So it was. It was neat. We drove around for about 3 hours, 4 hours, and then came back, slept it off, got up, had breakfast, and then went to the airport. It was. And then we flew to, into truck lagoon from Guam.

05:30
Now, the interesting thing about landing in truck Lagoon was, other than it was super hot, was all of the locals with coolers as luggage. Well, it turns out that they all go into Guam to shop and to sell their stuff and then fly back with all their weeks of supplies and stuff. Oh, that was something. That was cool in Guam. Guam had the last remaining Kmart in the planet, and it had the largest selection of spam I have ever seen. It was more like a PX than a Kmart, but it was. It was. That was. That was neat to see in just one of those little touristy things. But Guam was cool. And then we got to actual the island of. And we drove to Blue Lagoon resort.

06:08
It was about a three mile drive, five mile drive to get to the resort, and it took almost 50 minutes because the road was that bad. And the blue lagoon, probably the most famous of the hotels on truck Lagoon because it has a dive shop. And some of my clients had gone there a couple days early to get some extra diving in. And so I could see that there was some coolness to that, to have, to be able to dive. Those were little rickety boats compared to the liveaboard that were on. But the. The blue lagoon resort was probably one of the prettiest resorts and had probably the most potential. But the service was awful, and the food was worse, and so it had air conditioning, it had a bed, and it had a bunk house.

06:52
And that's all we really needed to get caught up to the day that we could get onto the boat. But once the boat had been picked up, once we picked up onto the boat, I was hoping. I was kind of glad that I never really went back. So we had planned on leaving right from the boat to head straight to the airport. When we go, a lot of people are coming back to the blue lagoon to be able to spend a day before they got on the boat, but we didn't do that. So we get out to the live aboard, and the odyssey was parked in a. On a dock that was like a real commercial dock with lots of container ships and exactly what you'd expect from a rundown ex military base. But the boat was unbelievable.

07:31
It had Starlink wi fi, it had air conditioned rooms, it had really good food, really spacious back deck, lots of really knowledgeable crew. We had a guide every time. But the coolest thing that the truck lagoons Odyssey had was it had a lift. And what you did was it wasn't a really bad back deck for those you guys that might have gone to North Carolina and dove off the Olympus or some of the bigger boats, but that had this lift. And the lift I don't think is legal in the US because it was set up in a really sketchy way, but it was designed in a really safe way and I felt comfortable with how it was done.

08:14
What you did was you swam up on it, put your feet on a graded thing, got your feet under you, and then you tapped on the. You banged on the thing and they hit the button and pulled you up. You were on handles, and so you're all clear of the deck and everything like that. And they got up on the handles and it was. And then they would unclip your bailout bottles and get you up on the boat or unclip your tanks and get you up on the boat and take off your fins. That was really cool. And the boat captain was a good old friend of mine from Moorhead City way back in the day, and he's awesome. Captain Mike Gerken and the crew was just as good. And the briefings were really cool.

08:50
Lots of history, lots of videos, lots of really good high class, high end feel to the whole thing. So I really enjoyed that. But let's take it into the diving now. The diving was a surprise at how much it was diverse. Being a great Lakes wreck diver, were there to go wreck diving, but they were more reefs than wrecks. The 70 years that they had been down made them unbelievably covered in growth. It was one of the most beautiful things you could ever possibly have imagined, as far as the. The growth was concerned. The other thing that was a big, huge surprise was that how much was still there. These things were. Must have been protected from the get go because there was a ton of stuff and it was carrying everything you would need. All these ships were maroos for the most part.

09:47
There were a couple battleships. They call them physicis or zukis. But the battleships were named something different, but anything was like a name. Maru, like the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek, would have been a cargo boat or a merchant vessel, some type of thing. So they had a lot of different maroos that were on there and they were packed full of stuff. The other thing that was interesting about it, that was a surprise was how shallow everything was. You were hitting the decks of these boats well above 100ft and most were shallower than 100ft to the bottom. With the exception of the San Francisco Maru, none of them were in technical depths. You could get 100 and 3140 on a couple of them, but you didn't have to. Most of everything that you saw in the superstructure was shallow.

10:35
So I can see why people with single tanks go there and not get technical certified and have it be just as cool as it was. The thing with it was that we set up this trip to be a recreational trip, a tech regional trip. So everybody was the highest certification level when everybody signed up was Tech 40 ccRd. Everybody else was advanced open water or deep divers and some instructors, but all that. But now, 7810 years later, the trip had mostly high end tech divers on it, with a couple exceptions. So the diving that we did was a combination of really long dives with very little decompression because of what were doing. My favorite wreck on there was the Heinen Maru. The Heinen Maru was probably the biggest ship that I've ever been on.

11:29
I'm gonna say it's arguably the biggest ship I've ever been on. That was non military, that was not a warship. The Ariskany is still the biggest ship I've ever been on. That was an aircraft carrier. The Hainen Maru started its life as a korean passenger liner. And I'm going by what the briefing did that I can remember. So it's kind of a. It might be a hodgepodge. Don't fact check me on this stuff. It was just cool. But the Haina Maru was 550ft long. It was a korean passenger liner. It had been taken over during the war to turn into a submarine tender. And I don't know remember what dive it was. We were doing two dives a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and I got stuck on this one, which is one of the things that was cool.

12:14
That was. That was an interesting thing because it was. It was weird. I was in a rebreather and my depth when I got stuck. What we did was went on a tour with a guide. Guide. And the guide was much smaller and the people in the group were much smaller than me and my camera couldn't fit through the hole that they exited out of. So I asked them to come back and then they left me. But then they turned around came back and got my camera, thinking that was my problem. But then they took my lights. So thinking that, I got it all done, then I put my. Went and pulled my backup light and I had to signal them, guys, no, no, come get me back out.

12:42
And at no time was I scared because I was in 65ft of water with a fresh scrubber and full tanks. I got in there, I'll figure a way out, way to get out. That's kind of the easy way. And there's. The boat was so big that it wasn't like you were sleeping through little passengers. It just happened to be that I couldn't get through this door and it was more the angle than anything else, I think. But when we got out, continued the dive, did another 45 minutes, and then at the end we saw the coolest thing. I mean, this thing was carrying everything you would need to build a war, right, to fight a war. It had guns, it had. It had bottles of sake, it had bottles of beer. It was all that.

13:17
But the coolest thing that this one had, that I don't think I'll ever see on a ship again, was down one of the gangways. There were five or ten spare periscopes for replacing the periscope on a submarine. I didn't even know you could replace a periscope on a submarine, but obviously, I guess you can. So these were really cool. They. There was no doubt that they were periscopes, and they were no doubt that they were as long as you could imagine, because they were like 60, 70ft long. But that was cool. Another one that was cool that we dove. Oh, that one. That one was cool too, in that it was 550ft long and it came within 35ft.

13:57
The top of the deck, it was laying on its side and the top of the side was 35ft, and that was covered with hard coral, like a coral reef. And so when you're up there doing your decompression a little bit deeper than 20ft, you could sit and just go on a nice long tour of this reef and see all the little things. And people had brought artifacts up and laid them out there, some. Some things like medicine chests and dishes and all that kind of stuff. But that was really cool. 115ft was the max depth on that one. So all the way down to the sand was 115ft. And so it was huge. It had a huge profile.

14:31
But the next one that I can remember off the top of my head, and there's only three or four that I remember, was the Fuji Kawamaru. Now, the Fujikawa Maru was an aircraft supply ship, and the reason that one was so cool was twofold. Number one, it was still full of aircraft fuel, so you had to be real careful when you came up into the hold, that you didn't go up into the hold because you could burn yourself on the aircraft fuel. And there were big barrels there still floating in there that could tell you that they remind you what it is. I went into the tool room on that one as a guide, and it had the famous compressor that looks like r. That thing was again shown pictures of it. You'll see them pop up on that. I'll probably have.

15:15
That's probably going to be the one that I have as the COVID photo of this podcast. But the r was a neat thing in this air compressor room, and it was a tight fit getting in there. Once you got in there, the picture that everyone takes isn't easy to get to. You had to kind of back into a corner, kind of move your camera around without hitting up the silt and then take the picture. So I was pretty happy to get a picture of it at all. But that was cool. That one was also carrying planes. So there's a intact zero fuselage in there. There was an intact zero cockpit, lots of landing gear, lots of parts and engines in that for the airplanes. And so that was really cool to see sea.

15:57
And then we also did the ice I 169 submarine, one of the biggest submarines in the. In the thing. It was one of the only submarines to get caught by the allies when they did Operation Hailstorm. That sunk everything. And that actually lasted a lot longer than I thought. They bombed the crap out of it for over a year just to make sure that the Japanese never got a base back there for the, for the navy. But it was basically the navy's, the japanese navy's Pearl harbor. But it was mostly merchant ships and mostly merchant ships under repair, where most of the ships are what was called the repair harbor. They had a repair harbor, they had a fifth fleet harbor and a couple other different harbors. And the repair harbor was there, but the submarine was running.

16:40
It was under repair, but they got it running and it was trying, it couldn't submerge, and it was trying to get away, and they bombed the shit out of it and sunk it. So it's blasted. But it's really, there's no doubt it was a submarine and lots of cool stuff. I mean, and then the San Francisco Maru, that's the famous one that's out there. It's called the million dollar wreck because there's so many people that have tried to talk about diving it. It's 140ft to the deck, 200ft to the bottom. Back in the day, I had friends that used to dive it on air with air decompression, bounce diving at eight to nine minutes and they do three or four different things on it. But it was cool. There were tanks on the deck, there was a lot of superstructure.

17:22
You didn't have to go deep on it, but we ended up doing about 155ft on it, just me and my wife on that one. But that was a really cool end of the trip. And that was the last wreck that we did. We did some planes, we did some other smaller ships, we did a battleship, lots of guns, lots of things that were there, lots of things that you would imagine war to be. And I'm still going through the pictures. There's so much to see there and so much to do there. It was. It was pretty darn incredible. So that being. Being done the all in all, it was. I mean, I broke some stuff. We had people break some stuff. Everybody got home safe, everybody got there great. But it was a great trip. I would like to go back.

18:13
I would do it a little bit differently. Obviously, I wouldn't wait seven years. I think that was the biggest thing that jaded me on the whole trip, is that everyone kind of was, had expectations of it being a tech trip. And they were kind of been out of shape when they wanted Trimix and they had to pay for it when they wanted Sorb and they had to pay for it because I normally nowadays include all that in a lot of the trips that I do. So people who have done trips with me since they signed up for that and since they've become tech divers were kind of bent out of shape. And so there was a little bit of complaining about that. But other than that, and it wasn't real public, no one got really upset about it.

18:52
But it was enough that, I mean, out of the 16 people that went, there were enough people that were hitting on me that was kind of like, man, how can I make this most spectacular dive? I mean, it sounds like you're not having fun. No, no. We're having a good time. We just wish it. I'm like, great. So next time we're going to do it, I will include everything and have that all taken care of ahead of time because I can ship a lot of that stuff there. But I didn't expect Covid to happen and I didn't expect Covid cancellation to happen the second time. So that's kind of part of it, part and parcel of it.

19:24
But when we got back to the boat, oh, the boat had Starlink, which allowed me to be a lot less stressed because I could talk to my shop and we could talk to people back home. We could talk to my family, I could talk to my dog. All the things that go with home. I was like, man, this is really cool. We've gotten really good at being connected, and I want to be connected for the rest of my life if I can do that. So later I'll talk about some of the stuff that has allowed that to happen, but in future episode. But I'm recording today. But all in all, that was cool. So we ended up getting back to the boat. And the boat captain made arrangements for everybody who was going back to the blue lagoon.

20:06
They had a twelve hour wait before their flight. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to get on the flight. And so we pull into the dock. Everybody heads for the blue lagoon. Boat captain comes back and says, your flight's been canceled. You're going to be on the same flight as everybody else. And I was like, shit, now what do we do? He says, well, I'm going to put you up in a hotel. We'll get you hooked up in a hotel. The airline's going to have to pay for it, so it's all easy. We ended up going to a different hotel that was right next to the airport. Now, this, from a standpoint of postcards, isn't anything near, close to what you would imagine it looks like. More like a compound that's inside a industrial park. But you go inside, it's a hotel.

20:44
Really nice hotel. The elevator was broken, but we never had to carry anything. They took everything up. They carried everything for us. They were really first class. And it was called level five. Now nobody goes to level five because there's no history there. There's no picturesque there. There's no japanese embankments there. There's no ruins. There's no anything as far as palm trees and the things that are beautiful when it comes to the blue lagoon. But you have spectacular food and amazing service. And it was within walking distance of the, of the airport. So were able to go over, get our permits early, get our exit passes early, get everything there, get our bags checked right away with good breakfast in between. It was really laid back leaving.

21:31
And so I think that if I were ever do and it was only like ten minutes from the boat, so if I was ever doing this again, that would be one of the things I would change. I mean, level five was a great restaurant slash, what do you call it? Restaurant slash hotel for what we wanted to do. So I was there. So I am going to go back. I think I need to. I mean, I need to rebuild my war chest a little bit. The trip cost me way more money than I expected it to because we had paid for it. But things that. That I had to pay for out of pocket cost twice as much that as they did as they had planned for originally. So that was something. But all in all, I think it was great.

22:18
And I would love to go back. It was. I would love to do it a little bit differently. I might go back as a guest next time with somebody else because I worked a little bit too hard on this one and stressed a little bit too hard on this one. So it is something that, all in all, I would highly recommend it. It was a bucket list trip for me. I don't need to go back, but I think that there are things that I would like to do differently that would make it a different one. So that was. That was pretty much all of May. We were supposed to do a couple trips at the end of May. Those got canceled due to weather and boats and money and all that kind of stuff.

23:00
And then because I had such a late start, I would have never gone on this trip in May. We had originally planned for it in mid June. And what that would have allowed me to do as a dive shop owner is to have the quarry up and running, have all my. My ordering done, have everything like that. So there's a lot. And having all my Internet. There was a lot of things infrastructure wise. We're getting a new POS system. We're getting a new website. All of that had to be put on hold because it was a three week trip. Pretty much. It was a week to get there, a week there, and then a week to recover. Coming back from the. From the. I mean, the jet lag was real, and I'd like to figure out a way to do that differently, too.

23:37
But all in all, great month of May and good start to the year, but let's go ahead and talk about May and June. So until we'll do that on the next episode, let's cut this one out for you guys that are having short commutes and we'll get to the next one shortly. We'll see you.